ICON A5 Seaplane

The ICON A5 light sport airplane is a two-seat carbon-fiber amphibious
seaplane with a 100 HP Rotax engine. The company says that it has
taken orders for 500 and will begin delivering them late in 2011 at a
price of approximately $180,000 (includes option and CPI
escalation).

This review is based on talking with the chief engineer of ICON at
Oshkosh and observing a demonstration flight at the Oshkosh Seaplane
Base in 2010.

Payload

An amphibious Light Sport aircraft is restricted by statute to 1430
lbs. gross takeoff weight. Based upon the empty weight, the ICON is
limited to 100 HP. Despite all carbon-fiber construction, the ICON A5
with typical options is going to be heavy. This will result in a
full-fuel payload of approximately 300 lbs. ("useful load" is about
420 lbs.; the fuel tank holds 20 gallons and gasoline weighs 6
lbs. per gallon).

Two corn-fed Americans plus headsets, life jackets, an oar, and the
other miscelleneous equipment required to operate on land and water is
very likely to weigh much more than 300 lbs. An aircraft operated over
gross weight will not deliver its book performance. Typical customers
flying with a companion won't be able to rely on any of the book
numbers for runway length and stall speed. The engineers seem to have
anticipated this and the most prominent instrument in the panel is a
military-style angle of attack indicator. This will show how close the
wing is to stalling, irrespective of how overloaded the plane is.

Landing Gear Down in the Water

More than 37 percent of ICON's existing position-holders have never
flown an aircraft. Very likely that means that they don't know that an
amphibious airplane is the most expensive kind of aircraft to
insure. Insurance company requirements and fees are more stringent for
a $200,000 amphibious seaplane than for a $400,000 helicopter.

Why are amphibious seaplanes so expensive to ensure and so dangerous
to operate? Aside from the two-pilot crews of a jet, pilots have a bad
track record of failing to use adjustable landing gear correctly. In a
land plane, this results in embarrassing gear-up landings in which the
plane slides down the runway on its belly. The prop is destroyed; the
engine is torn down and inspected; the belly is repainted; $30,000
later and the plane is ready to fly again. In a seaplane, putting the
landing gear down and hitting the water at 60+ mph almost always
results in the plane flipping over. Occupants may be killed on impact
or be trapped in the plane and drown.

This kind of accident has afflicted pilots with thousands of hours of
experience and advanced ratings. For example, Telford Allen, who had
been president of the Seaplane
Pilots Association died on August 1, 2010 after landing gear-down
in Moosehead Lake (story). Mr. Telford
was 64 years old and had nearly 50 years of flying experience, most of
it as a commercial pilot.

What does ICON say about the training that will be necessary to
operate the A5 safely? The brochure says 20 hours. The folks working
the booth at Oshkosh said 25 hours. Jon Karkow, the chief engineer and
test pilot, when asked what would happen if the plane were landing
gear-down, said "you'd probably flip over".

Could technology help? Terrain awareness systems know the location and
orientation of every runway at public airports worldwide. They keep
this in order to suppress warnings when pilots are landing. The same
database could be useful to warn an ICON A5 pilot "it looks as though
you're preparing to land with wheels down and I don't see a runway
ahead". One challenge is that it may be tough to distinguish between
"intending to land" and "intending to fly low for a while". Perhaps
ICON could install a button that the pilot can push to hear an
annunciated pre-landing checklist (this would be a very useful feature
in a lot of land airplanes as well!) The checklist would then be
augmented with "wheels are down, so let's hope this isn't a water
landing".

ICON has not announced that the plane will include any innovative aids
to prevent owners from succumbing to this classic amphibious seaplane
flying mistake.

Changing the Industry

Despite rapid population growth and growth in the number of airline
jobs, the number of pilots in the U.S. has declined roughly 25 percent
since 1980 (source;
FAA statistics show 692,000 active pilots in 1990 and 594,000
today). The U.S. population has grown from 226 million to 310 million
while the number of Americans capable of operating an aircraft has
fallen. If a grandfather is a licensed pilot, chances are that his
grandchildren will be ground-bound. Light aircraft manufacturers fight
over the scraps of what remains of the U.S. market and pin their hopes
on sales to growing countries such as China, Brazil, and India. A
typical scene in aviation is an old white guy from a manufacturer
whose sales have been declining for 40 years trying to sell an old
white guy who is flying a 30-year-old airplane on the idea that he
needs to replace it. Often the proposed replacement is with the
identical model. The Beechcraft Bonanza was introduced in 1947 and is
still in production today. The Cessna 172 was introduced in 1956 and
will likely celebrate its 60th anniversary with no significant
airframe changes.

ICON, by contrast, brought an assortment of trim multi-racial
LA-styled young men and women to Oshkosh. The founder and CEO Kirk Hawkins was
straight out of Central Casting for "square-jawed business executive
who used to be a fighter pilot". He stood up and gave a talk
reminiscent of Tom Cruise's motivational speeches in the movie Magnolia. The booth
was thronged at all hours of the show. ICON intends to market the A5
at boat shows and other venues where toy-loving semi-rich people hang
out. Currently, therefore, ICON is probably the only company with a
reasonable chance of expanding the market rather than simply taking
share away from another manufacturer.

Compared to Existing Seaplanes

As pointed out by grizzled seaplane pilots at Oshkosh, the ICON stacks
up rather poorly to existing certified amphibious seaplanes. For
example, a 1979 Cessna Skyhawk XP has a 210 HP engine, has four seats
and a payload of perhaps 450 lbs., is available for purchase today,
can be flown at night or in instrument conditions, and is a completely
debugged design. The Cessna on amphibious floats might cost just over
$100,000 and much less than that on straight floats.

In the ICON's favor are the facts that it isn't 30 years old, is
somewhat simpler than the Cessna, and there is much less risk of
chopping off someone's arm with the propeller when approaching a dock.

Who Funds This Stuff?

It is not hard to see who would want to buy a fun toy like the ICON
A5, but one has to wonder who funds a company like this. Suppose that
ICON sells al 500 airplanes and collects $200,000 in revenue from each
customer. That's $100 million. Suppose that two percent of those 500
aircraft are involved in fatal crashes in which a jury finds ICON
liable, either for telling unlicensed pilots that they could learn how
to fly an amphib in 20+ hours or for not including a
gear-down-in-water warning system. That's 10 crashes. Suppose that
each crash costs $10 million. One hundred percent of the company's
revenue has thus been paid out in legal awards.